Film review: Holy Matrimony (1943)

I don't know how, but I stumbled across this on YouTube (perhaps some algorithm picked up that I just bought The Bishop's Wife on DVD and it has Monty Woolley in it) and we watched it.  It's another "Winter's afternoon on BBC 2 (probably 4 or 5 now, I lost track how many there are these days)" viewing - well made, with some nicely witty dialogue (particularly between Wolley's character of the painter Priam Farll and his valet at the beginning), and some mildly humorous shenanigans.  I didn't know who Gracie Fields was, and somehow had it in my head that she was the Gracie married to George Burns (of whom he said "for thirty years my act consisted of one joke, and then she died") but instead she's the Lancashire-born vaudevillian most famous for the song "Sally" (of which, apparently, she was none too fond, in part because some of the lines were written by her first husband's live-in mistress).  She's a pleasant enough screen presence, but Monty Woolley so dominates the film that she doesn't really register much.  The basic plot, which spans the years 1905 to about 1908, is that Woolley's painter so loathes publicity that he has been living (with his reluctant valet, Henry Leek (played by the superbly droll Eric Blore)) in seclusion in various "suburbs of civilization" across Africa, South America, et. al. until the King decides to Knight this giant of the British arts and he is called back to London.  However, Leek gets pneumonia on the way, and dies just after their arrival.  However, the distraught Farll has two surprises coming.  First, the doctor mistakes him for the valet and the dead man for Farll (probably because he ensconced the sick valet in his own bed), a confusion that the publicity-shy Farll, who had been dreading the knighting, does not correct, and second, Leek had joined a "matrimonial society" on the way home, and Gracie Fields's Alice contacts him wanting to meet up.  They do meet up, but only accidentally, after a regret-filled Farll has been thrown out of his own burial service in Westminster Abbey.  Alice also thinks that Farll is Leek because Leek sent her a picture that both men in it captioned "me and my gentleman" without making it clear which was whom.  The confirmed bachelor swiftly falls for Alice and for wedded bliss in her house in Putney (he no longer has his own house because he's dead), and things go swimmingly (apart from a brief interlude with the original Mrs. Leek and her three large sons - apparently Henry was an aspiring bigamist) until a temperance movement deprives Alice of money from her stocks in breweries and the money starts to run short.  At this point Farll tries to come clean and convince her that they can make money from his painting, but she thinks he's crazy.  He takes a painting to a local art dealer who reveals himself a philistine (as is Alice - apparently Farll's painting is an acquired taste - he appears to be an impressionist) by valuing it at £15 (when in fact it's worth thousands).  Farll gives up in disgust, but Alice, to whom £15 is nothing to be sneezed at, starts to funnel Farll's accumulating pictures to the dealer.  Unknown to her, the dealer is selling them for £20 to Farll's original dealer, who has recognized them as Farlls and has been getting the requisite thousands for them.  However, he gets into hot water when one rich patron is informed by her butler that an omnibus featured in her most recent prized acquisition is brand new, and certainly didn't exist when Farll "died" in 1905.  She threatens the dealer with a lawsuit, which leads him to try to get Farll to come clean, something he has no intention of doing, especially when he discovers how the dealer has been profiting hugely from his work.  Is Priam and Alice's Putney Paradise to be destroyed?  Feel free to check out the excellent print on YouTube one wet afternoon and you can find out.  It's like a nice cuppa and a digestive of a film, comforting and a bit forgettable.